Irrlicht Engine

I just added some GUI-elements myself which needs updating all the time, however they don't!
The text is just drawn top of the old, resulting in an unreadable mess.

Anyone got a solution to this?

Would they in that case also be updated by themselves? As me_go_fast wantet life-bars and such, they will have to be updated, and if you don't dele them, I'm afraid you'll just draw them on each other, resulting in bad performance, but I'm not sure though.

As for the models, take a look at the Tools-sticky in the How-to forum!

The changeable armour and faces should be easy to to by using different textures. E.g. you have a generic human model and different textures which all fits to the model. Then you can just switch texture ingame, pretty easy ...

Agree with Tyn there.
Some years ago, I was working with a game with Genesis3D, and some guy wanted to make a car game, the physics became his doom... :p
Check up car physics for games or something at google!

also take a look at http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=97 . There's links to some good AI libraries. I'd imagine AI for a cargame would not be as hard as for e.g a FPS.
I think you'll do fine with just a pathfinder. Make a path along the middle of the road, give the opponents ...